The Book that Helped Create Democracy

So you think Bible translation is a nice easy academic job? You should read Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick.

It tells about the courageous scholars who first translated the Bible into English, men like William Tyndale, who was driven out of England for just proposing to translate the Bible into common English so everyone could read it.

Despite fierce opposition, Tyndale managed to translate the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament. Printed in Germany and Belgium, these English translations were smuggled into England hidden in grain sacks and other cargo.

That was at a time when the heavy hand of the Roman Catholic Church forbade lay people to read the Bible - and made sure they could not read it by allowing only Latin, Greek and Hebrew versions. In 1526 Bishop Tunstall of London decreed that all "books as contain the translation of the New Testament in the English tongue" should be seized and burned. Getting wind of Tyndale's efforts, officials had ships searched for contraband Bibles; Bibles were also confiscated from pastors and ordinary Christians, and huge bonfires of condemned books, including Bibles, were lit in London.

Nor did the persecution stop with burning Bibles. Tyndale himself was burned at the stake, along with many courageous pastors who preached from the English Bible and courageous lay Christians who were merely found in possession of a Bible.

Tyndale's was not the first English Bible - John Wycliffe had produced a handwritten translation more than a century earlier - but Tyndale's was the first one widely distributed, thanks to the invention of the printing press.

Later, with political power in England swinging from Roman Catholic to Protestant kings, persecution died down and several new translations were made. In 1611, King James authorized the translation known to us today as the King James version.

Apparently quality control was not a feature of the first English Bibles. According to Bobrick, the first edition of the King James Bible contained a typographical error about every ten pages. And one edition became known as the "Wicked Bible" because it omitted the word "not" from the seventh commandment, so that it read, "Thou shalt commit adultery." For that the printer was fined 300 pounds and rebuked by the Crown.

Bobrick concludes his history of the English Bible by noting that "by and large, those who pleaded for the rights of conscience, for free discussion, and for an unrestricted press were those who held to the supreme authority of Scripture in all things." Thus the English Bible produced "the idea of the sacred and equal importance of every man, as made in the image of God," a critical concept in the formation of English and American constitutional democracy.